LINGUIST List 13.1171

Sat Apr 27 2002

Qs: V Tense Inversion, Acoustic/Written Word Shapes

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  • William Morris, Verb tense inversion
  • g, literature on acoustic/written word shapes/impressions?

    Message 1: Verb tense inversion

     Date: Thu, 25 Apr 2002 17:46:50 -0700 (PDT)
    From: William Morris <wmorriscs.ucsd.edu>
    Subject: Verb tense inversion


    Short question: Does anyone know of any language in which past tense verbs can take on future tense meaning and vice versa?

    The background: Biblical Hebrew has a strange syntactic/morphological construction that is usually called the waw-consecutive (or vav-consecutive). Other names for this construction are "waw conversive" & "waw conservative".

    The word for "and" in Hebrew is the letter "waw", which is attached to the beginning of the following word. In Biblical Hebrew (mercifully not in Modern Hebrew) the attachment of a waw to a verb causes the sense to invert; past becomes future, future becomes past. And, since Biblical Hebrew was primarily a verb-initial language, this usage occurred frequently. It appears that the heavy use of "and" was the standard narrative style, as can be seen in almost any translation of the Hebrew Bible.

    Deeper, but still shallow, background: Weingreen, 1959, A Practical Grammar for Classical Hebrew, 2nd Edition, p252, quoting Professor G.R. Driver of Oxford, attributes this to Hebrew being a "composite" language, with elements of both Aramaic style verbs and Akkadian style verbs. According to this explanation, some Akkadian verb forms denoting aspect were superficially similar to the Aramaic verb forms that denoted tense, and regularization led to . . . you get the picture.



    A friend recently asked me whether any other languages have anything at all similar to this. I am most interested in verb phenomena, but I would also be interested if some odd construction causes singular nouns to mean plural, and vice versa.

    I will post a summary. Thanks!

    Bill Morris wmorrisucsd.edu

    Message 2: literature on acoustic/written word shapes/impressions?

     Date: Sat, 27 Apr 2002 17:48:51 +0100
    From: g <gina.joueucd.ie>
    Subject: literature on acoustic/written word shapes/impressions?


    Hi,

    Can someone direct me to research (and the proper terminology!) done on the factors that contribute to why "center", for example, may be better recognised when abbreviated "ctr" than "cnr"? I am also looking for analogous research for spoken word recognition (e.g. perhaps "defily" is a more recognisable corruption than "detily" for "definitely").

    Thanks in advance, Gina